Science Fiction Studies

# 15 = Volume 5, Part 2 = July 1978

Albert I. Berger

Science-Fiction Critiques of the American Space
Program, 1945-1958

The science-fiction community had more than the atomic bomb to celebrate as
World War II drew to a close. Not only had Hiroshima proved that their wildest
fantasy, nuclear power, was a reality, but the Germans had developed an
operational rocket ship as part of their war effort. Space travel had been the
most prominent feature of science fiction since long before the war, but even
within the science-fiction community there was doubt that men would ever really
blast free of the Earth's gravitational pull. Amazing's editor, T.
O'Conor Sloane, in his eighties and son-in-law to Thomas A. Edison, refused in
1930 to believe that the stories he printed about interplanetary voyages had any
connection with reality.1 Other influential science-fiction editors,
notably Amazing's founder Hugo Gernsback and Astounding's John
Campbell, were more receptive, but in this country the close relationship
between science fiction and rocketry continued to attach the pulp stigma to the
rockets, rather than the rocket's reality to the fiction.2 The German
response had been somewhat different, as the British discovered on September 8,
1944, when the first V-2s fell on Chiswick and Epping, having reached a height
of sixty or seventy miles and a speed of 3,000 miles per hour along the way.3

Campbell had kept his readers in Astounding informed on German rocket
progress with two articles by Willy Ley, former vice-president of the Verein
fuer Raumschiffahrt, the rocket society which had provided the core of the
team at Peenemuende. Ley had left Germany in 1934 and had contributed articles
to international scientific magazines as well as both fiction and articles to Astounding
on numerous subjects, although concentrating on space flight. His piece on the V-2,
while mistakenly assuming that it was designed by rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth,
discussed various smaller anti-aircraft rockets along with the jet-propelled V-1
and Me-163 fighter, carefully differentiating them and estimating V-2's size and
performance from the maze of misleading figures put out by Nazi propaganda and
Allied intelligence. Ley assumed that the Nazis would destroy all of Peenemuende
and kill the knowledgeable technicians before the Allies could capture them, so
that simply picking up the German pieces would be impossible. But he calculated
that by substituting a pilot and instruments for the warhead, the V-2 could be
fired to a total altitude of 200 miles, putting a man into the edge of empty
space. Simply knowing that the Germans had built V-2 meant that a similar rocket
could be built by the Americans for peaceful purposes.4

But Ley's readers were not that confident. In the last days of the war, a
science-fiction fan in the Air Force sent Campbell a photo of a V-2's vapor
trail taken from a B-17. Wind currents at high altitudes had pushed the vapor
into a variety of jagged shapes with no resemblance to the smooth upward path of
the rocket's trajectory. It was a phenomenon with which the Germans were
familiar, but to the fan and Campbell, who published it under the title of
"The Road to the Future," it suggested that rocket takeoffs might be
too rough for people.5 The picture ran in the same issue which
carried Campbell's first reactions to the atomic bomb, and the two developments
shared equal space in the letter column for months afterwards. Of these, the
letters on the V-2 were the more technical, drawing the attention of such
scientifically literate readers as Arthur C. Clarke, then a Cambridge graduate
and RAF technical officer involved in radar development. The concern that all of
them displayed, including Clarke, who was aware that only the vapor trail was
erratic, gave testimony to the urgency of their feelings about rocket flight. As
Theodore Sturgeon would later remark in reference to nuclear power, science-fiction
writers and readers had hardly expected to see their fantasies made real in
their own lifetimes, and if nuclear power was a cause for shock and fear, the
realization of space flight, even on the limited scale provided by the V-2, was
a source of excitement and hope. That a real rocket might work, but still bar
the road to the stars to humans was a source of dismay. Campbell, immersed in
both his editorials and a book on nuclear power, tried to be soothing,
erroneously suggesting that the V-2 was a weapon of desperation, hastily built
in the waning days of an otherwise hopeless war. A less makeshift rocket would,
he believed, be more stable.6

In a way, Campbell's rush to minimize the effort that went into the V-2 was a
symptom of the modes of scientific research he and his readers preferred. In
Campbell's first story, "When the Atoms Failed," his narrator is
called to scientist Steven Waterson's desert laboratory and asked to inspect a
spaceship which the inventor has built essentially by himself.7
Shortly after, Campbell was the first of the "world-wrecker" writers
to consider the amount of metal in the hundreds of spaceships destroyed in his
stories, and make provisions for recovering it after the battles, indicating his
awareness of industrial reality. But he could still think of a V-2 crash program
without a long lead time and delicate connections with the rest of Germany's
highly industrialized economy.8

In this attitude, Campbell was influenced largely by the experience and
examples of two men, Ley and Robert Goddard. A professor at Clark University,
Goddard had worked alone, or with a very small team in direct defiance of most
of the established science in the United States to build the first liquid-fueled
rockets in the world. Publishing solely in various reports from the Smithsonian
Institution, Goddard died before his reputation extended outside academic or
rocket society circles. On the other hand, Ley, who had had experience with
group research, the VfR, was extremely skeptical of it as a result of the
internal politics of the rocket society, the totalitarianism of the Nazis, whose
military built the V-2, and the scientific enthusiasms less respectable than
rocket flight to which the Nazi hierarchy was addicted, and on which they
demanded research.9 Both sets of experience, along with the
traditional science-fiction affinity for individual scientific heroes and rapid
breakthroughs, combined to enable Campbell to discount the extensive
development, long-term research and bureaucratic infighting which characterized
the actual rocket development program.10

Yet the rocket engineers and promoters were often science-fiction fans and
writers themselves. Tsiolkovsky, Oberth and Von Braun all wrote space fiction at
one time or another. Oberth and the VfR were technical advisers for Fritz
Lang's movie Frau im Mond, receiving enough money to build an actual
rocket they intended to launch in connection with the film's premiere. The plan
went awry, but at least one prominent rocket engineer, Krafft Ehricke, designer
of the Atlas booster which sent the first Americans into orbit, was
"converted to space travel" by the movie.11 G. Edwards
Pendray and Nathan Schachner, both presidents of the American Rocket Society,
wrote for science-fiction magazines under pseudonyms, as did Ley himself. Arthur
Clarke was an officer of the British Interplanetary Society before he became a
successful science-fiction writer. Among a long string of technical articles
predating his debut as a professional fiction writer was Clarke's proposal for a
communications satellite, written in October, 1945.12

Against this background, the divergence between the various developments in
space flight "predicted" by science-fiction writers and those actually
taken in the "real world" seem puzzling. Hardly an area of science
fiction produces less evidence that science fiction has a firm grasp on
scientific reality than the stories about space flight written in the first ten
years of the space age. Yet a closer examination reveals not only that science-fiction
writers were distrustful of the actualities of organized science, but that they
were sufficiently distrustful of it to examine its social roots at a time when
social criticism was extremely dangerous in the United States and when it had
almost entirely disappeared from even "serious," as well as
"popular" literature.

If one is willing to draw an analogy between space-flight fiction and
traditional mysterious-voyage fiction, science-fiction's use of the voyage as a
vehicle for social satire has an honorable heritage. Even without that heritage,
H.G. Wells's looks back at the Earth from the distant vantage point of a
spaceship were crucial benchmarks in the development of nearly every science-fiction
writer working at the end of the war. Campbell's writers were working within the
very heart of their tradition when they built their fictional ships for Astounding's
upgraded pages from 1939 on. Significantly enough, young Isaac Asimov, after
placing several early stories with other editors, first fulfilled his own
youthful dream of selling science fiction to Campbell with just such a story,
"Trends."

Stemming from sociological research Asimov was typing as part of his National
Youth Administration job, the story's premise has mobs motivated by religious
fanaticism vigorously oppose the construction of a moon-bound rocket, sabotage
it, and use the resulting explosion as an excuse for banning all scientific
research. According to Asimov, it was this social resistance to scientific
progress that intrigued Campbell and secured the sale of a story whose dialogue
and action were at best routine.13 Similarly, Heinlein's
"Requiem" and Alfred Bester's "Adam and No Eve," while
dealing with the mechanics of achieving space flight only superficially, are
principally concerned with the emotional commitments made by space pioneers and
the consequences of a launch accident respectively. Two stories by Julian Chain,
"Success Story" and "Prometheus," deal with resistance to
space flight stemming not from resistance to scientific progress, but to
advances in biological sciences which make people so completely comfortable on
Earth that they don't want to explore space.14

The most optimistic of the post-war first-launch stories came from
war-ravaged Britain, where Arthur C. Clarke wrote Prelude to Space over a
period of twenty days in 1947. The novel was not published for three years,
quite possibly because its tone of bland optimism was at odds with the austere
times. It has been Clarke's often stated belief that science-fiction reading is
preparing the public for the age of space flight, an attitude which this frankly
propagandistic novel demonstrates to the full.

Set in 1978, by which time the Thames Embankment has become a spacious and
peaceful park, Prelude to Space is narrated by a young historian sent by
the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Foundation to observe the final
development and launching of a moon rocket built by a British foundation modeled
after the American National Geographic Society, including its financing through
a popular magazine. In a preface written after the actual moon landings in 1969,
Clarke notes many of the differences between his projection and the actual
events of the Apollo program. Most noticeable were the differences in
technology; he had suggested reusable boosters, launching catapults and nuclear
powered rockets. But he was quick to point out that "The future of space
flight lies with such concepts as those described here; politics, and not
economics has shaped our present systems, and history will soon pass them
by."15

It was no accident that the concepts to which Clarke referred were limited to
technology. His defenses are strongest in those areas. But to Clarke the
principal theme of his book was not the exploration, but the absurdity of
exporting international boundaries into space, and by implication, suggesting
his multinational scientific organizations as models for a worldwide society
free of nationality. A technological determinist, as well as an incurable
optimist, Clarke assumes that the sheer poetry and nobility of the effort to
explore space will overcome national differences. He dismisses the "blood-curdling
prophecies" of the fifties as an example of mental illness. In his story,
set twenty years after the time it was written, he calls plans for the military
use of space "a typical by-product of that era's political paranoia. They
died, unlamented, as the world slowly returned to sanity and order."16

Pointing proudly to the United Nations Space Treaty of 1967 and to the
internationalist sentiments of the plaque on the side of the first Lunar lander,
Clarke is able to ignore both the moot nature of the UN treaty, and the extreme
nationalist sentiment in the United States, which simultaneously prosecuted the
war in Vietnam and prohibited the raising of the UN flag on the moon. Clarke's
Interplanetary Foundation is offered as a specific alternative to the isolation
and later remorse of the Manhattan Project scientists, who in Clarke's view, as
in those of other science-fiction writers, simply did not give enough thought to
the consequences of what they were doing before it was a fait accompli in
the hands of the military. Yet that too is suggested after the experience of the
VfR was known; the society was broken up and subordinated to the military
in Germany and then "liberated" by the Soviet and American armies.

In what one critic called his "pseudofiction" Clarke had spoken
through the mouth of his narrator, an historian whose previous experience had
been studying Renaissance Italy.18 The narrative technique provides a
convenient peg upon which Clarke hangs his description of the age of space
exploration as a new and more glorious Renaissance, but at the price of ignoring
the narrator's conviction that what he had been studying was "a little
crowded stage ... a microcosm of intrigues and assassinations."19

But Clarke's neglect of politics might have been related to his residence in
Britain, a country in which politics meant, in 1947, the rebuilding of a
war-shattered economy and the reorganization of existing industry and
technology. Postwar Britain was simply not in a position to consider the
political ramifications of expansionism at a time when an existing empire was
being dismantled. The novel languished on Clarke's shelves for three years as
testimony to the lack of British interest, but the same situation could work in
reverse in another country. For Clarke, a political system which was retrenching
as his was, was simply irrelevant to the kind of exploration in which he
believed. However, the United States has always believed in expansion as a
national policy, and it was in the United States that Prelude to Space
and the non-fiction The Exploration of Space first saw print and moved
Clarke towards his current measure of respect and material success. Prelude
was published by a book club operated by Galaxy, but The Exploration
of Space, not subject to the "space opera" stigma still attached
to science fiction, was sold for a sum in excess of $20,000; published by
Harper's, it became a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, serialized in the
Baltimore Sun and in Science Digest.20

Despite the evidence of enough interest in space flight on the part of the
American public to support Clarke and Willy Ley, and to supplement Wernher von
Braun's Army salary, the American government was only minimally interested in
space research. Charles Wilson, Eisenhower's shortsighted Secretary of Defense,
was uninterested in even military guided missiles unless an "immediate
military need" for them was shown, this despite the proven success of the V-2
and the objections of veteran rocketeers that by the time an "immediate
need" was apparent, it was too late to authorize new research.21
Vannevar Bush, wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development and one of President Roosevelt's initial advisers for the Manhattan
Project, had stated that guided missiles were inherently too inaccurate and too
limited in range to be worth their astronomical cost, even when armed with
nuclear weapons. In his authoritative view, rockets were only good as cheap
artillery and for air-to-air combat along lines little different than the end of
the just-completed war.22 Independent scientists, such as those in
Clarke's Interplanetary Society and Professor S. Fred Singer of the University
of Maryland, were showing how existing, or minimally modified, equipment could
launch small satellites as early as 1953, but politicians concerned with science
at all seemed far more interested in Communist spies in wartime Los Alamos than
in artificial satellites in orbit.23 The most prominent scientist to
be snared in their nets was J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose security clearance was
revoked two months after Singer's proposal for the MOUSE (Minimum Orbital
Unmanned Satellite of Earth) appeared in the Journal of the British
Interplanetary Society. At intervals in the early fifties, science-fiction
writers concocted varieties of scientific plots to deceive the world into
thinking it was being attacked by aliens; testimony to the despair many of them
felt towards the lack of official interest in space flight and the strangle-hold
direct military needs held on nearly all American research and development.24

Civil libertarians close to the sciences pointed out the different treatment
accorded American left-wing sympathizers like Oppenheimer and the German
rocketeers with their close ties to the Nazi regime. But while the rocket men
were trusted in a way the former atomic scientists were not, their dreams were
granted no greater hearing, at least not until the advent of plans for an
International Geophysical Year, and not with any urgency until that day in
October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite.
Science-fiction writers found their dream of space flight sandwiched between the
extremes of political neglect and rigid governmental control of information in
the security system, and they resented it.

Despite his political conservatism, Campbell had begun questioning the
security system the government had thrown around nuclear energy almost as soon
as its existence became publicly known. These 1946 editorials belabored both the
army's security, which had prevented a biologist from delivering a paper on
radiation treatments for cancer, and the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act)
with its death penalty for disclosure of even routine matters which happened to
be nuclear related, such as pump engineering data and mass spectographs. Putting
the issue of disclosure before the courts, Campbell felt, would require an
honest scientist to gamble his life to publish his research results in the
normal, pre-war fashion. Classification of research data forced non-government
scientists to use cyclotrons since the more efficient reactors were under
restrictions. "The result," he wrote, "can only be intellectual
starvation and technological decadence." Two years later, after several
editorials waxing enthusiastic over the potential research and medical tools
provided by nuclear energy, Campbell greeted the establishment of Brookhaven
National Laboratories, under the auspices of a consortium of civilian
universities, as a major step in research progress, and made a point of covering
the opening in a series of articles, photographs and drawings. Later still,
after the success of the first Soviet satellites, he discounted the conventional
picture of Soviet progress as the result of espionage, pointing out that the
Russians could hardly steal "secrets" American scientists had yet to
discover.25

Significantly, Campbell, a political conservative, and Cyril Kornbluth, a
liberal, shared similar view's of the effects of government-sponsored and
security regulated scientific research. Kornbluth, one of the first fans to
become a professional writer, had been a leftist in the late thirties, a member
of the politically-oriented Futurian Fan Federation, along with such future
notables as Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Donald Wollheim, and Harry Harrison.
Along with Wollheim, Robert Lowndes, John B. Michel, and Pohl, Kornbluth had
been excluded from the First World Science Fiction Convention at the 1939 New
York World's Fair by Sam Moskowitz, its conservative organizer, who alleged that
the Futurians, like the American Youth Congress to whom they wanted science
fiction fans to send a delegation, were a Communist Front.26 A
regular writer under pseudonyms for magazines edited by Pohl and Wollheim before
the war, Kornbluth returned from the European war to a career in mysteries and a
science-fiction partnership with Pohl which produced the major piece of social
satire to come out of the genre in the early fifties, "Gravy Planet,"
also known as The Space Merchants.27 But in his first solo
novel, Takeoff, Kornbluth used the construction of the first rocket to
the moon as a vehicle to attack the security system, not only for stifling
progress, but because the political climate within which it existed made the
United States easier prey for the Soviet Union; a sentiment with which Campbell
and Moskowitz would have agreed.

The novel's premise is that Atomic Energy Commission scientists have
developed a nuclear rocket fuel which can propel a one stage rocket to the moon.
Since, in Kornbluth's eyes, the first country to land and establish a base on
the moon would forever possess a military advantage on it, speed and secrecy are
of the essence, yet he is certain that the complications of the security system,
and the tendency of bureaucracies to favor third-raters would, together with
congressional stupidity and animosity towards science, delay the project until
the Russians reached the Moon. To forestall this, the novel's hero, the General
Manager of the AEC, together with a Howard Hughes-like industrialist, begin
construction of the rocket in secret, using an amateur rocket society very much
like the British Interplanetary and the American Rocket Societies as a front.
The rocket club thinks it is building a prototype so complete that the official
government opposition to rocket flight would have to change and the government
would then develop fuels and engines. Since the ship is being built publicly by
a group of "crackpots," it doesn't look like a real project worth the
attention of spies. Nevertheless, there is a spy on the project, and his murder
by a security agent forms the basis on which the plot moves towards the public
revelation of the project and the climactic flight.

Takeoff's criticisms of the security system then were well within the
limits imposed upon such criticism by liberals during the Cold War. Like better
known critics, including Leslie Fiedler, who wrote in the CIA's clandestinely
funded but intellectually respectable Encounter, Kornbluth felt that
security and the anti-intellectuality of the right wing would actually harm the
country's attempt to defeat the Russians with scientific weapons.28
In stark contrast to Clarke's Interplanetary Foundation, Kornbluth's heroic
rocketeers had every intention of exporting national frontiers into space and
building a nuclear missile base on the moon. The conservative Campbell had
opposed the establishment of the security system because it would restrict the
free flow of scientific information; Kornbluth, the former radical, added the
critique that it was ineffective. He has Daniel Holland, his AEC Manager-hero
explain why he decided to build the rocket secretly, through a private club:

If I had set it up as an A.E.C. project, the following things would have
happened. First, we would have lost security. Every nation in the world would
shortly have known the space-flight problem had an answer, and then what the
answer was. Second, we would have been beaten to the Moon by another nation.
This is because our personnel policy forbids us to hire the best men we can find
merely because they're the best. Ability ranks very low in the category of
criteria by which we judge A.E.C. personnel. They must be conservative. They
must be politically apathetic. They must have no living close relatives abroad.
And so on. As bad as the personnel situation is, interacting with and
reinforcing it, is the fact of A.E.C.'s bigness and the fact of its public
ownership. They mean accounting, chains of command, personnel-flow charts —
the jungle in which third-raters flourish. Get in the A.E.C., build yourself a
powerful clique and don't worry about the work; you don't really have to do any
.... 29

Clearly, security and bureaucracy were closely related in Kornbluth's mind,
and he continued the tradition of distrusting organized science on principle and
placed his faith in men who not only could work outside organizations, but who
could not work within them at all. Anyone who stayed long enough in government
service was "unmanned." Private enterprise was more highly thought of,
primarily on the assumption that independent researchers would be given their
heads if only they produced profitable results.30

Takeoff is, however, limited by its acceptance of the assumption of the Cold
War, its lightly sketched love story and the device of the secret project
masquerading as an amateur rocket club. In historical terms, Kornbluth was on
reasonable ground: the Wehrmacht had taken at least part of the VfR
seriously. But in view of contemporary developments, Kornbluth clearly had opted
for melodrama instead of verisimilitude. Some years later, James Blish returned
to the theme of the security system, adding a stronger and more realistic sense
of how security fits into society as a whole and deepening the criticisms of it
which had begun with Kornbluth and Campbell.

In its composition, They Shall Have Stars was a literary phenomenon
which is far more common in science fiction than it is in general fiction. Blish
had written a series of short stories for Astounding which had been
collected into a novel titled Earthman, Come Home, dealing with a time in
the future when anti-gravity devices enable entire cities to leave a poverty-stricken
and resource-depleted Earth and search for work throughout the Galaxy. Following
its success, Blish wrote a sequel, to carry the story on beyond the conclusion,
and two "prequels," to bridge the gap between the present day and the
beginning of the original novel. They Shall Have Stars which takes place
in 2018 was written second, as the first part of the tetralogy, and because it
is the most contemporary, the part of the series which deals most concretely
with social criticism.31

Drawing heavily on Spengler's Decline of the West, Blish draws a
picture of the United States as a rigid militaristic state under the control of
the hereditary director of the FBI.32 Opening with a quote on the
necessity for freedom of inquiry from Oppenheimer, Blish, like Kornbluth,
scathingly criticizes a system of control which both centralizes control and
compartmentalizes research workers and cuts them off from each other, not to
protect secrets from a foreign enemy, but to keep themselves safe from the
depredations of an unchallengeable secret police. Like Kornbluth, Blish sees
little hope for change within the executive branch and insufficient vision to
promote change among nearly all the members of Congress. However, he
"solves" the problem in a way as ingenious as Kornbluth's Holland but
more realistic and, in its way, a telling criticism of the way in which
scientific research is funded.

Blish's central hero is Bliss Wagoner, Chairman of the Joint Congressional
Committee on Space Flight, a freshman Senator from Alaska with neither
scientific background nor seniority, whose lack of traditional standing is taken
as a sign of the low esteem in which science is held. Space flight exists, and
research stations are in place on the satellites of Jupiter and the outer
planets, but space flight and science in general have been stagnant for many
years. Concerned, Wagoner secretly calls on Dr. Guiseppi Corsi, head of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, presented as a left-wing
organization. Corsi draws a direct connection between the problems of scientific
progress in general and the issues of government control raised by Kornbluth.

The more subtle the facts to be discovered become — the more they retreat
into the realms of the invisible, the intangible, the unweighable, the
submicroscopic, the abstract — the more expensive and time-consuming it is to
investigate them by scientific method.

And when you reach a stage where the only research worth doing costs millions
of dollars per experiment, then those experiments can be paid for only by
government. Governments can make the best use only of third-rate men, men who
can't leaven the instructions in the cookbook with the flashes of insight you
need to make basic discoveries. The result is what you see; sterility, stasis,
dry rot.

Corsi's advice was to avoid gigantic projects modeled on the success of the
Manhattan Project, and to have a picked staff go over "crackpot"
notions, to see which disregarded piece of information might yield knowledge.
Wagoner's staff finds such a notion, which in the end leads them to the anti-gravity
device. However, the development of the notion into a workable device requires
engineering test data which can come only from a gravitational field greater
than the Earth's, so Wagoner becomes the champion of a gigantic
"bridge" to be built on Jupiter, at great cost in both lives and
money. Blish shows how Wagoner can get the project approved as a defense measure
without anyone knowing its purpose, indicting both the hold defense spending has
on the political system and the ease with which a project can be approved simply
because it resembles a familiar success. Wagoner is well aware of the
limitations of the Manhattan Project method which Corsi had sketched for him. He
can only justify it to Corsi by measuring its size, not against a terrestrial
economy, but against the size of the universe itself. On that scale, the thirty
mile high, eight mile wide and constantly growing bridge is nothing more than
"a piece of attic gadgetry."34

The bridge, however, is not the only new invention Wagoner's methods develop.
Since even at the vast speeds the spaceships equipped with the anti-gravity
devices could attain, interstellar flights would be longer than normal human
lifespans, Wagoner sponsors drug research to produce "anti-agathics,"
drugs which will artificially ward off death indefinitely. Even if human efforts
to begin exploring the galaxy are only bits of attic gadgetry on the universal
scale, on the terrestrial scale they are sophisticated, expensive and complex
feats of organized effort. The bridge, with its putative connection with the
defense effort, and its existence as a completely government project, obscures
that fact, since Blish is so critical of the defense system. But he includes the
second project to point it up, complete with a description of the processes with
which contemporary drug firms search out new organisms and their pharmaceutical
properties.35 Blish, along with physicists like Enrico Fermi and most
science fiction writers, was nostalgic for the days when scientific experiments
could be run off with bits of string and crumpled paper, and he believed that
such experiments produced better results.36 But he was careful to
measure his bits of string and paper against both the society from which they
came and the universe they intended to measure and explore.

At the end of the novel, the first interstellar ship and its crew are leaving
on their first trip, but Wagoner's deceptions have become public knowledge and
he is tried and executed for his "crimes." Unlike Kornbluth, Blish had
been able to transcend the Cold War and realize how closely the American
security system resembled its own picture of a Soviet dictatorship. But like
Kornbluth and like Campbell, Blish was entranced with the idea of challenging
the expanding complexity of scientific research by allying science fiction's
traditional respect for the individual researcher and its equally traditional
disrespect for the established scientists who derided the genre's seemingly
extravagant claims. Science fiction stories by practicing scientists are among
the sources checked by Wagoner in his search for new ideas.37 Wagoner
and his admittedly third-rate staff succeed where the entire remainder of the
government fail because, having accepted that the respectable scientific method
did not work without the freedom of information killed by the security system,
he decided to "winnow chaff." If respectable science could not open
the road to the stars, there was only one alternative, "to go to the
crackpots."38

3. Walter Dornberger, V-2, (New York: Ballantine Books,
1954), p. 22. Domberger was commander of the German rocket development program
at Peenemuende which built the V-2. Willy Ley, "V-2: Rocket Cargo
Ship," in Adventures in Time and Space, Raymond Healy and J. Francis
McComas, eds. (New York: Random House Modern Library, 1946), p. 363, after an
initial appearance in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1945.

4. Ley, ibid., p. 364.

5. "The Road to the Future," Astounding,
November 1945, p. 99.

6. See Astounding's "Brass Tacks" column from
November 1945 to July 1946, with particular reference to the March and April
1946 columns in which Clarke's letter and replies to it appeared. Campbell's
comments were in his replies to the letters and in his May and October 1945
editorials. Dornberger's V-2 is a good account of the actual development of the
rocket, with particular emphasis on economic and political considerations.

9. Milton Lehman, The High Man: The Life of Robert H.
Goddard (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Co., 1963); Ley, "The End of
the Rocket Society," Astounding, August 1943, Rockets, Missiles
and Men in Space (New York: New American Library, 1968), 3rd edition, pp.
158-191, 230-235, and "Pseudoscience in Naziland," Astounding,
May 1947. This last is a scathing commentary on the attention paid by the Nazi
leadership to doctrines claiming variously that the universe was a hollow
sphere, with the earth existing on the inside, or imbedded in a gigantic block
of ice.

10. Dornberger, V-2 and Ley, Rockets, pp. 228-278.

11. Ley, ibid., p. 406.

12. See Carter, previously cited, and Arthur C. Clarke,
"Extra-Terrestrial Relays," Wireless World, October 1945. The
legal difficulties Clarke would have had had he attempted to patent his idea is
the subject of "The Lagging Profession," by Leonard Lockhard, Astounding,
January 1961.

27. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1953), after an original appearance as "Gravy
Planet," in Galaxy, June 1952.

28. Leslie Fiedler, "McCarthy," Encounter,
August 1954. For an angry and perceptive analysis of both Encounter's CIA
connection and the context of Fiedler's critique of McCarthy see Christopher
Lasch, "The Cultural Cold War," in The Agony of the American Left
(New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1969), p. 61 ff.

31. Citations are from James Blish, They Shall Have Stars,
(New York: Avon Books, 1957), although the most accessible edition is Cities
in Flight (New York: Avon Books, 1970) which contains They Shall Have
Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman, Come Home, and The
Triumph of Time.

32. See R.D. Mullen, "Cities in Flight as a
Spenglerian History," in Cities in Flight, pp 597-607, after
original publication in Riverside Quarterly in 1968.

33. Blish, They Shall Have Stars, pp. 14-15.

34. Ibid., p. 119.

35. Ibid., pp. 23-26.

36. Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 239.

37. Blish, They Shall Have Stars, p. 67.

38. Ibid., p. 16.

ABSTRACT

Feminist SF writers of the 1960s and 1970s share a surprising
number of revolutionary assumptions: a politics of anarchism, a metaphysics of
the organic, and a psychological and social vision of unity, wholeness, balance,
and cooperation. The concept of androgyny often serves as a way of bringing all
these assumptions together. In a society that defines people by sex, sex is a
social and political issue, and as a utopian possibility transcending sexual
dualism, androgyny is a political response. Following a survey of why
male-dominated popular science fiction has failed to live up to its
revolutionary promise, this essay surveys science fiction that incorporates
references to androgyny: The Left Hand of Darkness and other novels
by Ursula K. Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, Joanna Russ's The
Female Man, and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Feminist writers
of SF have created utopian visions that have emerged expressly from their own perspective
as women artists, and that have begun to coalesce into a literary and political tradition
of their own.